Droit et Cultures (Oct 2020)
Médias, droit et panique morale : tirer les leçons d’un procès suisse pour excision
Abstract
In 2008, a Somali couple, refugees in Switzerland, were convicted of the clitoridectomy of their 2-year-old daughter. The procedure had been carried out by a Somali physician in the family’s apartment in Zurich twelve years earlier. Subsequently, the parents abandoned the practice and did not perform it on their younger daughters, and the mother campaigned against it during meetings of Somali women. Obscuring the change in attitude of the prosecuted parents, the media coverage of this trial resulted in an upsurge of fear that female circumcision would be a contemporary reality on Swiss soil, albeit this case is the first and only case known to date of a female circumcision performed in the national territory. In order to deconstruct this «moral panic», this paper aims at providing critical analysis of media representations of female circumcision by examining the court report of this case. We will discuss discrepancies between the media coverage and what can be known from legal documents, and reflect on the effects of such media representations on the broader debate of immigrants’ integration in Switzerland.
